The Polygons of Another World - Interactive Graphical Applications in R
This repository contains links and resources related to my talk at RStudioConf 2022.
Slides + Materials
- PDF slides for talk (exported
from Keynote)
- See the
videodirectory in this repo for all the animations and videos
- See the
- View my Talk on RStudio Conf Schedule
- Original inspiration for this talk comes Fabien Sanglard’s blog series where they detail the struture of the game and how it was ported to different gaming platforms.
Key packages
{eventloop}- provides a friendly wrapper around the event-driven interactivity provided by R graphics devices.- See online documentation to view rendered vignettes etc
{nara}- tools for fast manipulation of R’snativeRasterdatastructure.- See online documentation to view rendered vignettes etc
Game: AnotherWorld
AnotherWorld- full code AnotherWorld game written and playable in R.
Games: Pacman
pacman- full code for a playable game based on Pacman.
{eventloop} Demos
Grid-based
drawing
 |
Line-based
drawing
 |
Streaming
plot data
 |
Game
of Life
 |
Asteroids |
Raycast
‘Wolfenstein’ 3d engine
 |
Wordle
 |
Interactive
Mystery Curves
 |
Verbose
example  |
Particles
 |
Limitation - WindowsOS
The WindowsOS version of R does not currently have support for the
onIdle callback and therefore does not support event-driven
interactive graphics as implemented in the {eventloop}
package.
If you are a windows developor capable of adding support for
an onIdle callback to R itself, please get in
touch!
Limitation - Flickering Cursor
The cursor icon in an {eventloop} window will flicker
because of some hard-coded behaviour in R’s double-buffered
x11() graphics device.
{eventloop} makes use of the x11() graphics
device with a double-buffered backend based on Cairo
(x11(type = 'dbcairo')).
The double-buffering within the graphics device is coordinated
through use of dev.hold() and dev.flush()
calls.
Whenever dev.hold() is called, the cursor will be set to
the busy cursor (usually a stopwatch on macOS), and when
dev.flush() is called the cursor reverts to a normal
pointer arrow.
Since dev.hold() and dev.flush() are called
when drawing every single frame, the cursor will flicker between these
two images.
The interim solution is to not have the cursor over the window when interacting with the app. This only really works when the app solely relies on keyboard feedback (like this pacman game).
The more complicated solution will involve crafting a patch to R itself to make the cursor change behaviour user-configurable rather than hard-coded.
If you are are an R developer capable of crafting such a patch to R , please get in touch with me!